The people of bitcoin

Published the nine-page whitepaper on 31 October 2008, mined the genesis block on 3 January 2009 and released the first software days later. Satoshi wrote code, emails and forum posts for about two years, then went quiet; the last known emails date from April 2011. Roughly 1.1 million early-mined bitcoin attributed to Satoshi have never moved. Many people have been named as candidates. None has been proven, and a UK court ruled in 2024 that claimant Craig Wright is not Satoshi.

Often called the godfather of digital cash. His 1982 paper on blind signatures showed how electronic money could be private, and in 1989 he founded DigiCash in Amsterdam to sell it as “ecash”. The system worked but relied on a central company, which went bankrupt in 1998. Bitcoin’s key departure was removing that central issuer.

British cryptographer whose 1997 anti-spam scheme, Hashcash, is the proof-of-work idea cited in the bitcoin whitepaper. Satoshi emailed him in August 2008, before publishing. He co-founded the infrastructure company Blockstream in 2014 and leads it. A New York Times investigation in April 2026 argued he could be Satoshi; Back denies it, as he has for years.

Proposed “b-money” on the cypherpunks list in 1998: an anonymous, distributed electronic cash in which participants keep a shared ledger and money is created by solving computational puzzles. It was never built, but it is the first reference in Satoshi’s whitepaper. Dai also wrote the widely used Crypto++ library. The smallest unit of ether, the wei, is named after him.

Coined the term “smart contract” in the 1990s and designed “bit gold”, a scheme for scarce digital tokens created by proof of work and chained together, around 1998. Bit gold is the closest known ancestor of bitcoin’s design. Szabo has repeatedly been suggested as Satoshi and has repeatedly denied it.

A lead developer of PGP and creator of reusable proofs of work (RPOW) in 2004. He downloaded bitcoin the week it launched, helped Satoshi fix early bugs, tweeted “Running bitcoin” in January 2009 and received 10 BTC from Satoshi in block 170, the first transaction between two people. Diagnosed with ALS that year, he kept coding with eye-tracking software. He died on 28 August 2014.

Maintained the Mixmaster anonymous remailer, worked on PGP and studied privacy technology at KU Leuven, where David Chaum was among his advisers. He died in July 2011, aged 31. Admirers embedded a memorial to him in the blockchain. A 2026 documentary suggested he and Hal Finney together were Satoshi; like every such theory, it offered no cryptographic proof.

Released Pretty Good Privacy in 1991, putting strong encryption in ordinary hands. The US government opened a criminal investigation into the software’s spread overseas and dropped it in 1996. The episode, sometimes called the first crypto war, shaped the cypherpunk conviction that privacy tools should be built and shipped rather than asked for. Hal Finney was one of his earliest collaborators.

A retired Intel physicist who, with Eric Hughes and John Gilmore, started the cypherpunks mailing list in 1992. His short 1988 manifesto predicted that cryptography would let people trade and communicate beyond the reach of governments. The list became the room in which Hashcash, b-money and many of bitcoin’s ingredients were first argued over. May died in December 2018.

Co-founded the cypherpunks list and wrote its 1993 manifesto, which argued that privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems and that people who care must write the code themselves. That ethic of building rather than lobbying runs straight through to bitcoin.

One of the inventors of public-key cryptography in the 1970s. His hash tree, patented in 1979, lets a single short fingerprint commit to a huge set of data. Every bitcoin block header contains a Merkle root summarising all of its transactions, which is what lets light wallets verify a payment without downloading the whole chain.

In 1991, at Bellcore, they described how to chain document hashes together so that records could not be backdated: in effect, the first blockchain. Their work accounts for three of the eight references in the bitcoin whitepaper. Since 1995 a service based on their design has published its running hash in the classified pages of the New York Times.

A Massachusetts programmer who found bitcoin in 2010, built a “faucet” that gave away five bitcoin per visitor, and was handed the project’s keys when Satoshi left. He led development until 2014 and was chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation. He favoured larger blocks in the scaling dispute, and in 2016 publicly endorsed Craig Wright’s claim to be Satoshi, which he later called a mistake. He has not been active in development since.

A Finnish student who wrote to Satoshi in 2009 and became his first regular collaborator, running bitcoin.org and the original forum. In October 2009 he sold 5,050 BTC for about five dollars, the first known sale for US dollars. In 2024 he published his full email correspondence with Satoshi while testifying in the UK trial that rejected Craig Wright’s claim.

A Florida programmer who, on 22 May 2010, paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas ordered for him by another forum user. It is remembered as the first purchase of a physical good with bitcoin and is marked every year as Bitcoin Pizza Day. Less famously, he also wrote early code for mining on graphics cards, which ended the era of mining on ordinary processors.

A Google engineer who corresponded with Satoshi from 2009 and received one of Satoshi’s last known emails in April 2011. He wrote bitcoinj, the library behind many early mobile wallets, and co-led the big-block client Bitcoin XT. In January 2016 he left with an essay arguing the project had failed, a verdict the following decade did not bear out.

A Linux kernel contributor who became one of bitcoin’s first core developers in 2010. He later co-founded the blockchain firm Bloq and led development of SegWit2x, the 2017 compromise to double the block size that was abandoned days before its planned fork.

A Dutch developer who took over as lead maintainer from Gavin Andresen in April 2014 and oversaw releases through SegWit and Taproot with a deliberately low profile. From 2021 he began spreading the role among several maintainers, arguing no single person should be a bottleneck, and then stepped back.

Belgian engineer behind an unusual share of bitcoin’s modern plumbing: hierarchical deterministic wallets (BIP 32), the libsecp256k1 signature library, Segregated Witness, bech32 addresses, and the Schnorr and Taproot specifications. He co-founded Blockstream and later joined the research group Chaincode Labs.

Proposed CoinJoin in 2013, co-invented Confidential Transactions and first described Taproot in January 2018. A co-founder and former chief technology officer of Blockstream, he was one of the most prominent technical voices for small blocks during the scaling war.

A developer since 2011 who maintains Knots, an alternative node client with stricter default filters, and co-founded the OCEAN mining pool. He designed the mechanism that let SegWit activate as a soft fork. He is the best-known opponent of using bitcoin to store arbitrary data and was the public face of BIP-110, the data-limiting soft fork that failed to gain miner support in August 2026.

Canadian developer known for replace-by-fee, the CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY opcode and the OpenTimestamps project, and for a career of pointing out how things could break. An HBO documentary in October 2024 named him as Satoshi. He denied it flatly and the film offered no proof.

A cryptographer whose work includes scriptless scripts, contributions to Schnorr signatures and Taproot, and Miniscript, a language that makes complex spending conditions safer to write. He also wrote one of the clearest early analyses of the Mimblewimble protocol.

A former BitGo engineer who co-founded the multisignature custody company Casa and maintains one of the most used collections of bitcoin learning resources. His home was targeted in a 2017 “swatting” attack, after which he wrote extensively on personal privacy. In 2026 he co-authored BIP-361, a contested proposal to phase out quantum-vulnerable signatures.

Began contributing as a teenager, built the relay network that speeds blocks between miners, co-founded Blockstream and later worked at Chaincode Labs and at Spiral, Block’s open-source group, on the Lightning Development Kit. He has long argued that miners, not pools, should choose which transactions go into blocks.

Argentine cryptographer who in 2013 identified the “Patoshi pattern”, a distinctive fingerprint in early blocks that underlies the common estimate that Satoshi mined about 1.1 million bitcoin. He reported several serious bugs to early developers and later designed Rootstock, a smart-contract sidechain.

British-Iranian programmer who wrote the first Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, BIP 1, establishing the process still used to propose changes. He created the libbitcoin toolkit and co-built Dark Wallet, an early privacy wallet, in keeping with a radical reading of the cypherpunk tradition.

Began buying in 2011 and funded a string of early companies, including BitInstant, BitPay, Blockchain.com and Kraken, earning the nickname “Bitcoin Jesus”. He became the leading advocate of Bitcoin Cash after the 2017 split. Arrested in Spain in 2024 on US tax charges, he resolved the case in October 2025 through a deferred prosecution agreement and a payment of about $49.9 million, after which the indictment was dismissed.

Co-founded BitInstant in 2011, which at its peak handled a large share of bitcoin purchases, and was a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation. He pleaded guilty in 2014 to aiding an unlicensed money-transmitting business linked to Silk Road users and served about a year in prison. He has since worked as an investor and podcaster.

An early evangelist who launched the gambling site SatoshiDice in 2012, at one point the source of more than half of all bitcoin transactions, and sold it in 2013. He settled with the SEC in 2014 over unregistered share sales, founded the exchange ShapeShift, and remains one of the best-known libertarian voices in crypto.

A lawyer by training who began recommending bitcoin publicly in 2011 and hosted an influential early podcast. He started “Proof of Keys”, an annual event on 3 January that encourages people to withdraw coins from exchanges to wallets they control, as a test of both their own setup and the exchanges’ solvency.

A programmer who in 2010 repurposed a domain he had registered for trading Magic: The Gathering cards into the first major bitcoin exchange. He sold Mt. Gox to Mark Karpeles in March 2011, long before its collapse, and went on to co-found Ripple and then Stellar.

A French developer in Tokyo who ran Mt. Gox as it grew to handle most of the world’s bitcoin trading, and who was in charge when it halted withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 with about 850,000 BTC missing. In 2019 a Tokyo court acquitted him of embezzlement and convicted him of falsifying data, with a suspended sentence. He has since worked on other technology ventures.

Launched the Silk Road darknet market in 2011, where bitcoin first found heavy real-world use, much of it for illegal drugs. Arrested in a San Francisco library in October 2013, he was convicted in 2015 and sentenced to life without parole, a sentence many bitcoiners campaigned against as excessive. President Trump granted him a full pardon on 21 January 2025.

An Australian computer scientist who has claimed since 2016 to be Satoshi Nakamoto and pursued developers and critics in court on that basis. In March 2024 the High Court in London ruled, after a trial brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, that he is not Satoshi and that documents he relied on were forged. He later received a suspended sentence for contempt of court.

Meyer “Micky” Malka built and sold financial startups in his native Venezuela, then co-founded the payments company Bling Nation in Silicon Valley, which became Lemon and was sold to LifeLock in 2013. In 2012 he founded Ribbit Capital to back financial technology worldwide. After its first $100 million fund closed, Ribbit put money directly into bitcoin and into Coinbase in 2013, followed by Xapo and other bitcoin companies, and Malka served as a director of the Bitcoin Foundation. Ribbit later became a major backer of Robinhood, Nubank and Credit Karma.

An Argentine entrepreneur whose childhood memory of hyperinflation made bitcoin click for him early. He is widely credited with introducing the idea to much of Silicon Valley’s elite around 2012 and 2013. He founded Lemon Wallet and then Xapo, which stored bitcoin in bunkers for institutions; its custody arm was sold to Coinbase in 2019 and the company continues as a private bank in Gibraltar.

Created the Bitcoin Investment Trust in 2013, later renamed GBTC, the first vehicle that let US investors hold bitcoin in a brokerage account. His holding company DCG owns Grayscale and backed hundreds of crypto firms. Its lending arm Genesis went bankrupt in 2023; New York’s attorney general sued DCG and Silbert over the collapse, and they deny wrongdoing.

The Olympic rowers used part of their Facebook settlement to buy a reported one percent of all bitcoin in 2012 and 2013. In July 2013 they filed for the first spot bitcoin ETF; the SEC rejected it in 2017 and again in 2018. They founded the exchange Gemini in 2014, which serves as a custodian for some ETFs and listed on Nasdaq in September 2025.

A Silicon Valley investor who won the US Marshals’ June 2014 auction of 29,656 bitcoin seized from Silk Road, paying above the market price at a time when the Mt. Gox collapse was still fresh. He has been one of the asset’s most consistently optimistic public voices since.

A former Tiger Management trader who turned his macro fund toward bitcoin in 2013 and launched what is generally described as the first US investment fund dedicated to it. His letter to investors that summer urging them to buy is a well-known artefact of the period.

A New York venture capitalist and long-time blogger who began writing about bitcoin in 2011 and whose firm led Coinbase’s first major funding round in 2013. He was among the first mainstream investors to treat it as a technology platform rather than a curiosity.

The co-author of the Mosaic browser wrote a widely read New York Times essay, “Why Bitcoin Matters”, in January 2014, comparing it to the early internet. His firm backed Coinbase and went on to raise some of the largest crypto venture funds.

A former Facebook executive who began buying bitcoin around 2012 and 2013 and has said that he and partners once held a meaningful share of the supply. He promoted the idea of holding a small percentage of net worth in bitcoin as a hedge well before that view was common on Wall Street.

A former Goldman Sachs partner and Fortress macro manager who bought bitcoin personally in 2013 and founded Galaxy Digital in 2018 as a merchant bank for the sector. Galaxy co-sponsors an ETF with Invesco, runs trading, lending and mining businesses, and moved its listing to Nasdaq in 2025.

A former Airbnb engineer who started Coinbase in 2012 to make buying bitcoin as simple as using a bank app. The company went public in April 2021 and became the custodian for most US spot bitcoin ETFs, which makes it one of the most important single points in the ecosystem.

A former Goldman Sachs trader who joined Brian Armstrong in 2012 to build Coinbase, left in 2017 and co-founded the crypto investment firm Paradigm.

Visited Mt. Gox’s offices to help during its 2011 security breach, concluded the industry needed a better-run exchange, and launched Kraken. He stepped back from the chief executive role in 2022 and remains chairman. Kraken has confirmed that it filed confidentially for a public listing.

Known as CZ, he built Binance from a 2017 start-up into the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume. In November 2023 he pleaded guilty to a US anti-money-laundering charge, stepped down as chief executive, and served four months in 2024; Binance paid $4.3 billion. President Trump pardoned him in October 2025.

Ran BTCC, the first bitcoin exchange in China, through the years when Chinese trading and mining dominated the market and until regulators closed mainland exchanges in 2017. He later founded the hardware wallet company Ballet. His brother Charlie Lee created Litecoin.

A former Citi trader whose exchange introduced the perpetual swap in 2016, a futures contract with no expiry that became the most traded instrument in crypto. He pleaded guilty in 2022 to failing to maintain an anti-money-laundering programme and was pardoned in March 2025. He is now better known as an essayist and investor.

Built FTX into one of the largest exchanges before it collapsed in November 2022 with billions in customer funds missing. A New York jury convicted him of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023 and he was sentenced to 25 years in March 2024. The episode is the standard cautionary tale for leaving coins with a custodian.

Wrote, with Tadge Dryja, the 2015 paper that described a network of payment channels able to settle bitcoin transactions instantly off-chain while remaining enforceable on-chain. He later co-authored the Plasma scaling proposal for Ethereum.

Co-designed Lightning with Joseph Poon and went on to research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, where he proposed Discreet Log Contracts and Utreexo, a way to make full nodes far lighter.

A former Stanford and Yale lecturer on internet policy who co-founded Lightning Labs in 2016. The company maintains lnd, the most widely deployed Lightning software, and Taproot Assets, which carries stablecoins and other assets over Lightning channels.

Known online as “roasbeef”, he is the lead architect of lnd and a co-author of much of the Lightning specification, as well as the designer of Taproot Assets and the compact block filters used by light wallets.

A long-time Linux kernel developer who joined Blockstream in 2015, wrote the Core Lightning implementation and drove the BOLT specifications that let different Lightning software interoperate. More recently he has worked on proposals to restore and extend bitcoin’s scripting abilities.

A Chicago developer who built the Zap Lightning wallet and then Strike, a payments app. He announced El Salvador’s bitcoin law from a Miami stage in 2021. In 2025 he co-founded Twenty One Capital, a bitcoin treasury company backed by Tether, and took it public on the NYSE that December. He stepped down as its chief executive in July 2026 after a proposed three-way merger collapsed; Strike remains independent.

The most prominent technology executive to make bitcoin a personal cause. Block added bitcoin buying to Cash App in 2018, funds open-source developers through Spiral, makes the Bitkey wallet and designs mining chips, and holds roughly 8,600 BTC. In February 2026 Block cut more than 4,000 jobs in a restructuring Dorsey tied to artificial intelligence.

Former chief strategy officer of Blockstream and a combative small-block advocate during the scaling war. He left in 2022 to found JAN3, which makes the Aqua wallet and lobbies governments to adopt bitcoin, and worked on El Salvador’s proposed bitcoin-backed bonds.

Released the Ordinals protocol in January 2023, a scheme for numbering individual satoshis and attaching data to them as “inscriptions”, which brought NFT-style collecting to bitcoin and set off a long argument about what block space is for. He followed it with Runes, a token protocol that launched at the April 2024 halving.

An economist-programmer who has argued since 2015 that bitcoin should support “drivechains”, sidechains secured by its own miners (BIPs 300 and 301). Unable to win support for a soft fork, he launched eCash in 2026, a hard-fork copy of bitcoin with drivechains enabled. It drew criticism for reassigning dormant coins linked to Satoshi on the new chain.

A researcher who published BitVM in October 2023, showing that arbitrary computation can be verified on bitcoin without changing its rules, using fraud proofs between two parties. The idea underpins a wave of newer bridges and rollup-style layer 2 designs.

A pseudonymous Turkish developer who proposed Ark in May 2023, a layer 2 design in which users hold off-chain “virtual” outputs coordinated by a service provider, without needing to manage channels or inbound liquidity as on Lightning. Several teams are now building implementations.

A pseudonymous developer who, with Ethan Heilman and Isabel Foxen Duke, authored BIP-360, the proposal for a quantum-resistant output type called pay-to-Merkle-root. Published in revised form in February 2026, it is the foundation of the current debate about preparing bitcoin for quantum computers.

Known as “Slush”, the Czech programmer launched the first mining pool in late 2010 so that small miners could share rewards; it runs today as Braiins Pool. He then co-founded SatoshiLabs, which shipped the first hardware wallet, the Trezor, in 2014, and helped write the seed-phrase standard most wallets use.

Founded the software company MicroStrategy in 1989. In August 2020 it put $250 million of its cash into bitcoin, and then kept going, raising debt and equity to buy more. Renamed Strategy in 2025, it reported holding 848,000 BTC on 4 October 2026, the largest corporate position by a wide margin. Saylor moved from chief executive to executive chairman in 2022 and is bitcoin’s most relentless corporate advocate, and to critics its most leveraged.

Took over as chief executive from Michael Saylor in August 2022 and runs both the legacy analytics software business and the financing machinery, including several classes of preferred stock, that funds the company’s bitcoin purchases.

Tesla disclosed a $1.5 billion bitcoin purchase in February 2021 and briefly accepted it for cars before suspending payments over mining’s energy use. It sold about three quarters of its position in 2022. Trackers listed Tesla with roughly 11,500 BTC in October 2026. His posts have repeatedly moved the price, a point critics raise about the market’s maturity.

Has led one of the largest publicly traded miners since 2021 and pursued a strategy of holding much of what it mined. In March 2026 MARA sold more than 15,000 BTC as it expanded from pure mining into energy and AI computing infrastructure.

A former Goldman Sachs derivatives trader who in April 2024 turned a small Tokyo-listed hotel operator into Japan’s answer to Strategy. Metaplanet reported about 44,000 BTC at the end of September 2026.

Runs the issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin, which has put part of its profits into bitcoin and mining since 2023. Tether was the principal backer of Twenty One Capital and took full control of it in 2026 after buying out SoftBank’s stake.

Publisher of Bitcoin Magazine and organiser of the annual Bitcoin Conference, where Donald Trump spoke in 2024. He advised that campaign on bitcoin policy and in 2025 launched Nakamoto, a treasury company that merged with the listed healthcare firm KindlyMD.

The president’s second son co-founded American Bitcoin, a mining and treasury company majority-owned by the miner Hut 8, which listed on Nasdaq in September 2025. The Trump family’s crypto ventures have drawn sustained conflict-of-interest criticism from Democrats and ethics groups, which the family rejects.

Translated the bitcoin whitepaper into Chinese and co-founded Bitmain in 2013, whose Antminer machines came to dominate mining hardware. He was the most powerful backer of bigger blocks and of Bitcoin Cash in 2017. After a long boardroom fight he left Bitmain and now leads the listed miner and chip designer Bitdeer.

Called bitcoin an index of money laundering in 2017. In June 2023 his firm, the world’s largest asset manager, filed for a spot ETF, the moment many on Wall Street took the asset class seriously. The iShares Bitcoin Trust launched in January 2024 and grew faster than any ETF before it; Fink now describes bitcoin as an international store of value.

One of the first public fund managers to gain bitcoin exposure, through GBTC shares in 2015. ARK partnered with 21Shares on a spot ETF application that sat at the front of the SEC’s queue in January 2024.

Had Fidelity mining bitcoin experimentally by 2015 and launched Fidelity Digital Assets, an institutional custody business, in 2018, years ahead of rivals. Fidelity’s spot ETF is unusual in using the firm’s own custody arm rather than an outside custodian.

The macro trader’s May 2020 investor letter, written as central banks expanded their balance sheets, disclosed a bitcoin position and compared it to gold in the 1970s. It is often cited as the point at which bitcoin became respectable for hedge funds.

Said in November 2020 that he owned bitcoin, calling it a possible store of value for a younger generation, while still holding far more gold. His public stance has shifted with macro conditions since.

Leads a firm best known for gold funds that first filed for a bitcoin ETF in 2017 and kept refiling through years of rejections. VanEck’s spot fund trades under the ticker HODL.

Led Grayscale when it sued the SEC over the refusal to let GBTC convert into an ETF. The company’s win at the DC Circuit in August 2023 forced the regulator’s hand. He stepped down in May 2024.

Joined BlackRock in 2018 and built the team behind the iShares Bitcoin Trust. He is the firm’s main public explainer of how it frames bitcoin for institutional portfolios.

A former ETF industry journalist and executive who became the main public voice of Bitwise, a crypto-specialist asset manager whose spot fund trades as BITB. His research notes to financial advisers are widely circulated.

Not an investor or advocate but the analyst whose running odds of approval, with colleague James Seyffart, became the scoreboard for the spot ETF saga. His commentary on fund flows remains a standard reference.

Works alongside Eric Balchunas tracking crypto fund filings. His reading of the court calendar in Grayscale v. SEC and of the SEC’s deadlines proved accurate when approvals arrived on 10 January 2024.

Called bitcoin a scam in 2021, then courted its holders in 2024, speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville. In office he signed a March 2025 executive order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve from forfeited coins, signed the GENIUS stablecoin act in July 2025, appointed crypto-friendly regulators, and pardoned Ross Ulbricht and Changpeng Zhao. His family’s own crypto businesses are a continuing source of ethics criticism.

Made El Salvador the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, in September 2021, and began buying it for the treasury. Everyday use stayed low. Under a 2024 loan agreement with the IMF the law was amended in early 2025 so that accepting bitcoin is voluntary. The government has nonetheless kept adding to its holdings.

Bought her first bitcoin in 2013 and became its most committed advocate in Congress. She introduced the BITCOIN Act, which would have the government acquire a million coins, and chaired the Senate’s digital assets subcommittee. She announced in December 2025 that she would not seek re-election in 2026.

A former Goldman Sachs partner who had taught a blockchain course at MIT. As chair he treated bitcoin as a commodity but pursued much of the rest of the industry through enforcement. The SEC approved spot bitcoin ETFs on his watch in January 2024, after losing to Grayscale in court; his statement that day stressed it was not an endorsement.

Nicknamed “Crypto Mom” for her dissents, beginning with the 2018 rejection of the Winklevoss ETF, in which she argued the agency was holding bitcoin to a standard it applied to nothing else. She led the SEC’s Crypto Task Force from early 2025 and left the commission on 2 October 2026.

A commissioner under George W. Bush who returned to lead the agency in 2025. Under him the SEC dropped most of its pending crypto cases, permitted in-kind creations and redemptions for crypto funds, and approved generic listing standards that sped up new products.

A venture capitalist and former PayPal executive named as the administration’s “AI and crypto czar”. He chaired the working group behind the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve order and the push for stablecoin legislation. He left the role in March 2026 and became co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Served as executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets for the first months of 2025, floating ideas for “budget-neutral” ways to add to the reserve. He left in August 2025 and joined Tether to lead its US stablecoin business.

Succeeded Bo Hines in August 2025 as the White House’s day-to-day lead on crypto policy. He has said the administration remains committed to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve while working through legal obstacles to funding it.

The Arkansas Republican introduced the CLARITY Act, a market-structure bill that would divide oversight of digital assets between the SEC and CFTC. It passed the House 294 to 134 in July 2025. A Senate procedural vote on its version failed 49 to 50 in September 2026.

The most prominent critic of crypto in Congress. She has pressed for anti-money-laundering rules to cover wallets, miners and validators, argued that the industry enables sanctions evasion and fraud, and opposed the 2025 and 2026 crypto bills on consumer-protection and conflict-of-interest grounds.

Wrote the unanimous August 2023 opinion in Grayscale v. SEC, which held that the regulator had acted arbitrarily in approving bitcoin futures ETFs while rejecting a spot product without explaining the difference. The ruling made approval of spot ETFs a matter of time.

A Greek-British technologist whose talks from 2012 onward introduced a generation to bitcoin, and whose 2014 book Mastering Bitcoin became the standard technical text. He consistently presented it as open infrastructure rather than an investment.

His 2018 book placed bitcoin in a history of money told from the Austrian school’s point of view, arguing that a fixed supply makes it the hardest money yet. It is the most influential single statement of the “sound money” case, and a frequent target of mainstream economists.

An engineer turned investment researcher whose long-form reports brought an analytical, data-heavy style to the bitcoin thesis. Her 2023 book Broken Money frames money as ledger technology and bitcoin as a new kind of settlement network.

A former Fidelity analyst known for essays on bitcoin’s settlement assurances, proof of reserves and the mining energy debate. In recent years he has also been a prominent voice urging developers to take quantum risk seriously.

A former Google engineer whose 2018 essay, later a book, laid out the idea that a new money emerges in stages: collectible, store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account. It remains the most-shared short argument for the store-of-value view.

An engineer and former army aviator who came to bitcoin from value investing and hosts a long-running weekly show interviewing developers, miners and macro investors.

Known as “Pomp”, he built a large audience through a daily newsletter and podcast aimed at bringing Wall Street to bitcoin. In 2025 he launched ProCap, a bitcoin-focused financial company.

A former trader and television host who was promoting bitcoin on air in 2011, when the price was a few dollars. Known for theatrical delivery, he later became an adviser to El Salvador’s government on bitcoin.

Host of the “What is Money?” show, which approaches bitcoin through philosophy and monetary history in long conversational series.

A Dutch institutional investor writing under a pseudonym who in 2019 published a model tying bitcoin’s price to its scarcity, measured as existing stock divided by new annual flow. The model was enormously popular and has been heavily criticised; its forecasts for the 2021 cycle were not met.

A pioneer of reading the public blockchain as market data, popularising measures such as the NVT ratio that compare network value with activity.

A former television news reporter who interviews investors and economists for a general audience, and wrote the 2025 book Bitcoin Is for Everyone.

Makes the case that bitcoin matters most to people living under authoritarian governments or collapsing currencies. He directs grants to open-source developers and wrote Check Your Financial Privilege.

A British broadcaster whose interview show What Bitcoin Did became one of the most downloaded in the field. He also owns Real Bedford, a non-league English football club he rebranded around bitcoin.

An Australian host whose long-running technical interview show is a common way for newcomers to hear directly from developers working on wallets, mining and Lightning.

Bitcoin’s most famous sceptic. He has argued for years that it produces nothing, so its price depends only on someone else paying more, and in 2018 called it “rat poison squared”. He stepped down as Berkshire’s chief executive at the end of 2025.

Buffett’s long-time partner was blunter still, describing bitcoin as contrary to the interests of civilisation and praising China’s ban. He held that view until his death in November 2023, aged 99.

Called bitcoin a fraud in 2017, later said he regretted the word, and has gone on comparing it to a pet rock. His bank, meanwhile, became an authorised participant for spot ETFs, and in 2025 he said clients would be allowed to buy bitcoin, likening it to defending a right he would not exercise himself.

A long-standing critic of central banks who shares bitcoiners’ diagnosis of fiat money but not their remedy. He has argued since the early 2010s that bitcoin has no intrinsic value and that gold is the real hedge.

The New York University professor, known for warning of the 2008 crisis, told a US Senate hearing in 2018 that crypto was the mother of all scams and bubbles. He has continued to argue that bitcoin fails as a unit of account, means of payment and stable store of value.

Has written sceptically about bitcoin since 2011, arguing that it solves no problem ordinary money has not solved and that its uses are largely speculation and illicit payments. He left the New York Times in late 2024 and continues to write independently.

Wrote the foreword to The Bitcoin Standard in 2018, then reversed. His 2021 paper argued that bitcoin had failed as a currency and was too volatile to be a hedge, and that an asset that pays nothing and might go to zero is hard to value at more than zero.

Has said crypto assets are based on nothing and should be regulated globally, and has kept bitcoin out of discussions of central bank reserves. The ECB’s own staff have published some of the sharpest official critiques.

A Dutch economist and data scientist whose Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index has been the most cited critical estimate of mining’s electricity use, carbon and electronic waste since 2014. Industry researchers dispute his methods; his work has kept the environmental question on the agenda.